


they took our love, filled it up with novocaine, and now we're just stuck

by cyanica



Series: maybe i just took too much cough medicine [whumptober 2020] [7]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Abandonment, Angst, Bucky Barnes Feels, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Communication Failure, Crying, Dissociation, Dubious Consent Due To Identity Issues, Flashbacks, Hurt Bucky Barnes, Hurt No Comfort, Hurt Sam Wilson, Implied Sexual Content, Love Triangles, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, One-Sided Attraction, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Post-Coital, Sam Wilson Needs a Hug, Touch-Starved, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, Unhealthy Relationships, Unrequited Crush, Unrequited Love, Whumptober 2020
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2020-10-15
Packaged: 2021-03-08 23:40:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27025195
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cyanica/pseuds/cyanica
Summary: The universe was far too big, too unfamiliar and Steve didn’t love him the way he loved another, yet Bucky and his delusional, broken brain would instead use Sam like medicine to heal what Steve couldn’t, because maybe broken hearts fixed themselves that way.Or Bucky says the wrong name, and there’s a lot of unrequited love that can’t be solved by replacing one person for another.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Sam Wilson, James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Series: maybe i just took too much cough medicine [whumptober 2020] [7]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1947775
Comments: 4
Kudos: 31
Collections: Whumptober 2020





	they took our love, filled it up with novocaine, and now we're just stuck

**Author's Note:**

> rated mature coz (the end of) on-screen is sex taking place at the start, but this isn’t smut. it's basically just implied. there’s also a dub-con consent warning. the sex is consensual, yet bucky consents not because he thought sam was steve, but because he wanted sam to be steve and therefore was able to convince himself that he was – so consent for the wrong reason(?). i left it in as a tw just in case.
> 
> whumptober prompt day 8: abandoned
> 
> title from ‘novocaine’ - fall out boy

"Steve–" 

The word slipped from his mouth like an ingrained Sunday morning prayer. It was as if he’d whispered it a thousand different times in a thousand different ways like some fanatic ritual of desperation – of underserved rapture. 

The room smelled the way it had back from a time where neither of them had lived as long as they had, we’re as broken as they were – and the sticky-sweet aroma was that of five-cent cups of brewing coffee, of watercolour and charcoal on parchment notepads, and of the familiarity of warmth from a softer, smaller touch in his larger hands.

The heat pulsed from his body, the feel of his lover inside him was all-consuming. It was enough for the backs of his eyes to burn with a constellated sky of Brooklyn’s starry night, the way it had looked when the world was cleaner – innocent. He and Steve had watched it up until daybreak, connected the spotted glows of Cassiopeia or Scorpius with glassy, glazed-over eyes from the fire escape, the weight of that grounding, perfect bird-bone hand within his own. 

Bucky thinks he may have said the namely prayer again, the taste of it sweet and _right_ in his mouth as the euphoric intoxication of his orgasm devoured through him at the solidifying touch of Steve inside him, _with_ him. 

God, it had been so, so long. Bucky had missed him, he had. Steve had been missing from Bucky for as long as he relearned how to remember, how to connect the Brooklyn constellations together, how to say his own name – 

But when the ecstatic high of his orgasm melted away and the wrongful coldness started to seep back down into his bone marrow, all that was _charcoal_ and _starry_ and _Steve_ burnt to ash along with it. 

Reality sunk in the way it did after a dreamless sleep – the world less vibrant, under saturated, too _cold_. The sheets smelled of clinical soap rather than sleep or sunrise coffee, the bedroom too big and alien, the body on top of his undeniably real and familiar but so, so _wrong_.

Sam had stopped moving, his eyes wide and pained the way they looked when Bucky sometimes forgot the things he shouldn’t – the year, the English language, his freedom from HYDRA, his own name. 

But this wasn’t _forgetting_. It was fantasy. It was Bucky calling for a name that was dead and gone and left to exist only within the past. It was Sam’s face of collapsed euphoria at the realisation that _this_ – intimacy, love (whatever they seemed to call it) – was a lie in which Bucky used to feel the things he couldn’t, be loved the way he needed to be loved, only by someone he didn’t.

“You just–” Sam said, his hands suddenly coming away from Bucky’s body like he couldn’t bear to touch him, as if he were something vile, something _false_. The phantom handprints leaving Bucky’s waist made the ephemeral warmth bleed from the atmosphere, drowning him in the intangible ice of Bucky’s mind where Steve remained as an abstract, dead memory that Bucky no longer had the privilege to hold onto. 

Sam’s body on top of Bucky’s – untouching, silent – felt claustrophobic, forbidden, even though Bucky ached to convince himself it wasn’t. He hadn’t meant to get lost in his own head, drown away in the intangible world of Brooklyn in the ‘30s where things were always so small and simple and sweet – but he _had_ , and it _hurt_.

_Fuck_.

Bucky stared back almost shocked, eyes as wide as Sam’s had been, as if he couldn’t believe the fucked-up nature of his own head to destroy what _should_ have been romantic and intimate between him and Sam, by instead longing for the things he couldn’t have.

"I…” Bucky started to say, but he couldn’t begin to find the words as the cold suffocation of the room pressed down around him. He was an imposter in Sam’s bedroom, pretending to be something else that could love him, go through the motions of sex, yet simultaneously dream of someone else to fill the insufferable, gaping whole inside his heart that they themselves had left there to rot like a bullet wound. 

“I didn't,” he tried to say again, but the lie came undone as it escaped his lips, heavy and wrong in the air alongside everything else that was fake and false and unreal.

"Shit, Barnes.” Sam said, became now he knew. He knew he knew he knew, and he was bearing witness to all the secrets Bucky didn’t know he had, everything that he tried to repress ever since Steve fell in love with the love of his life, while Bucky fell from the sky upon a train into the snow.

Sam couldn’t touch him. He slid off Bucky’s lap and sat on the end of the bed, still staring at him with whose betrayed, pained eyes that Bucky didn’t have the right to stare back at.

How was he supposed to fix _this_? How was he supposed to forget about Steve when Steve was the only thought he'd even had since before it all? 

He knew it was fuck-up, he knew he was a fucking awful piece of shit to pretend to love someone the way Sam wanted to be loved – the way Bucky wanted _Steve_ to love him – but he didn’t think this _longing_ was unsalvagable, until now. 

_God_ , how badly he wanted to forget.

It had almost been like a mathematical equation that Bucky had pieced together the same way he had with the broken mosaic fragments of his mind from Before. If Sam was whatever Steve had never been – if Sam filled the Steve-shaped hole missing from his soul – then that should have been enough, right? If Bucky kissed Sam, if he fell asleep next to the other man’s anchoring gravity, if he had sex with Sam the way he had ached for love with Steve, then that would have fixed his broken, damage brain from falling into pieces of the past because he couldn’t fall in love anymore, right? 

_Right?_

"Fuck, I didn't mean–” Bucky said, running his hands through his hair, refusing to think about how he wished they were Steve’s, about how he had thought of Sam’s lips as Steve’s, about deluding himself that it was Steve was inside him, rather than Sam. He had convinced himself that he was with Steve together, two innocent fucking teenagers in their scrappy little apartment littered with art and coffee, underneath the constellated starry night sky, rather than _here_. Here where the universe was far too big, too unfamiliar and Steve didn’t love him the way he loved another, yet Bucky and his delusional, broken brain would use Sam like medicine, because maybe broken hearts fixed themselves that way.

Sam didn’t think so. Deep, deep down where foreign words replayed like record loops inside his fraying sanity, or where he could taste the burn of electricity throughout his mouth, Bucky knew that things didn’t work that way, either.

"You weren't even looking at me,” Sam whispered, the sound small and sad. _Hurt_ , he realised. He was hurt in the same way Bucky was, as if Bucky’s delusions and inability to be loved were a carcinogenic curse, a disease passed from one broken man to another. It wasn’t even Steve's fault anymore. This was all Bucky. “It’s like you're not even here."

Bucky swallowed against the lump in his throat, feeling his stomach twist uncontrollably as if the organ was rotting from inside. 

"I am, Sam." He said with a painful solidification behind the signal syllable of Sam's name, perhaps in the hopes that that would mend all that was broken and fucked up between this crumbling pseudo-relationship that they had believed was love. It didn’t sound like a lie in the desolate coldness of their familiar but loveless afterglow, but somehow they both knew it was one. 

The kaleidoscope of memories anciently buried, and long undead that smelled of charcoal on parchment and snowflakes in the winter, was fraying from Bucky's mind like endless seams of disintegrating cotton. The past was warm; it was familiar; perhaps even bittersweet like the ache in his chest whenever lucidity seemed to revive itself within his brain.

And yet now, it was so very, very cold. Unrelentingly so, as if the flesh that had been touched by the other’s had been abandoned by the sun, while the sheets that should have smelled of charcoal and lavender, didn't. 

"I want this. I want us." Bucky’s unwilling, undeserving hands reached out, like a man beginning the forgiveness for Sam’s touch. He picked up Sam’s hand with his own human palm, and their intertwined fingers felt like a dead weight, rotting underneath the hard mattress and chilled sweat of their bodies. Their laced skin felt as frozen as Bucky’s had been in the snow, as bloodied as it was now from the many sins of his condemned, ephemerally long existence.

The cold was consuming him, slowly devouring the flesh and metal of his being from the catalytic touch of Sam's hand against his own. The sweeter, unreal fantasy of Brooklyn apartments and watercolour canvases and the feel of someone forbiddenly familiar drained away with each beat of their erratic hearts, and the lie of love within their painful afterglow.

Bucky wasn’t sure how much longer he’d be able to keep Sam’s hand within his own, the touch inevitably becoming claustrophobic just as Sam’s body had been once he’d realised it wasn’t Steve’s. 

Luckily, Sam ripped his own hand away, and although it twisted like something awful inside Bucky’s chest, he couldn’t help but be relieved. 

"You sounded damn sure of what you wanted thirty seconds ago–" Sam spat, scoffed into the vile, suffocating air that felt too agonizingly heavy, and broke his gaze away from Bucky’s eyes for the first time since Bucky had said Steve’s name. To Sam, maybe Bucky was hardly the same person he’d been a minute ago. He’d been many things that Sam had forgiven, though a fraud, a _liar_ , hadn’t been one of them. 

Bucky sat small, hunched in on himself and staring at the unfamiliar sheets. He opened his mouth to talk, yet the words were strangled. They didn’t sound right, they _weren’t_ right. This was all so very wrong, and Bucky wasn’t sure he even wanted to save it anymore. "It just slipped. It doesn't mean anything–"

“It’s not even me you're trying to convince here, is it?"

Bucky didn’t know. He didn’t know why the lie that they both knew for what it was was still dragging itself from his lips like a sadistic ritualistic prayer, but it did and he couldn’t stop it. False intimacy and unreal love were all he had now. The act of deluding himself that he wanted what he didn’t, and loved what he couldn’t in the hopes of feeling something other than his love’s abandonment, was all he had left. Bucky wasn’t sure how he could live with being entirely alone, lovelessly isolated.

“It's not like that.” He said, only because it was, and, “I want you,” only because he didn't.

Sam was silent for too long, thinking and brooding and mulling over the fact that Bucky was never in love with him the way he had said he was. 

"Awesome.” He said finally, the sound small and anchored by an aching hurt that throbbed like a knife carved into his chest, his back, his lungs. “You’re still in love with the guy who left you for his fifties housewife and I'm _what_? Your quick-fix band-aid to get over the guy? You're fucking _rebound_? Something you use to fool yourself with into believing you want someone you actually _hate_?"

"I don't hate you," Bucky said, and maybe, that really was the first thing he had said since the beginning that wasn’t a lie. It somehow didn't entirely feel like the truth either though, because despite his relearning of the world and the concept of remembering his own humanity, he knew you weren’t supposed to hurt the people you loved. He had spent a lifetime doing nothing but breaking people apart, and yet here he was, supposedly recovered, and doing it all the same, just in different ways.

"You don't like me.” Sam looked up back to face Bucky again, his eyes red, marred with hurt and forced hate, and suddenly Bucky felt his lungs constrict inside his chest like the oxygen in the room had been dissipating ever since the euphoric afterglow turned to smothering grey ash.

"Sam –"

"I'm done.” Sam told him, voice venomous and unlike anything he’d ever heard Sam sound like. “I’ll fuck you from the back next time, that way you don't have to look at me. It'll be easier for you to convince yourself I'm _him_." 

"Sam, please.” His voice sounded like a beg, although Bucky wasn’t entirely sure what he was asking for at this point – what the _point_ even was. “It was an accident. I want you, I do."

"Are you in love with Steve?" 

"I –"

"Holy shit. You are, aren't you?" 

"It's not like that." Bucky whispered, but the words drowned away and became frozen in the ice where the intangible touch of Steve Rogers existed inside his head, along with his small, bird-bone hands, his pale flesh that rosied in the cold, the soft sound he’d make when he’d slept. 

Bucky had thought he’d get to hear it until the end of their ephemeral infinity, holding Steve within his arms until they were neither frostbitten nor afraid or unloved. The train and the sky and the snowflakes that fell with him would’ve disintegrated from Bucky’s memories at the anchoring touch of Steve’s hand laced within his own – never letting go. 

Yeah. Fuck. He was in love with Steve Rogers. Steve Rogers who he saved, who he died for, who saved him, who died for him, who left him. 

Sam couldn’t fix that. Bucky didn’t know why he’d ever thought he could. Now, here they were: both left broken and tainted, betrayed by one unlovable lover or another, and poisoned in the crimson of Bucky’s dagger left like a disguised parting gift from Steve, that now Sam shared from Bucky’s inability to _let him go_.

"Then prove me wrong.” Sam pleaded, and Bucky knew the look in his face because it is the one he sees in the mirror. " _Please_ , Buck, prove me wrong."

He broke Sam the way Steve had broken him, and the thought made Bucky weep. 

His own name sounded wrong as if left Sam's mouth. It was only for Steve to ever say. It belonged to him, more so than it ever did to Bucky and knowledge hurt like stinging showers at 3AM, like Sam's graze going up and down his back, like the words _'it's gonna be okay, Buck'._

He was crying, he realized. Mournful, hurting tears pushed themselves from his eyes and he cried for Steve who couldn’t love him back enough to stay around, and for Sam who he couldn’t love enough to make up for it all. 

“Kiss me like you aren't disappointed I'm someone else. Tell me you love me and make me want to believe you. Fuck me without needing to fool yourself I'm _him._ "

Bucky clenched the sheets, needing something to hold onto, anything at all, as if each passing moment he was drifting further and further out into the cold, unanchored. "I –" he moved his mouth to speak as the frost ate away at everything he was. Sam needed Bucky in the way Bucky had needed Steve, but he still couldn’t get his mouth to say the words Sam needed to hear.

Sam watched him as Bucky breathed shakily, uneven breaths through his tears, taking in the sight of the other man sobbing through silent cries upon their desolate bed. 

"Awesome.” He said again, and the word was so painfully hurt. It was angry and betrayed and Bucky knew he didn't have the right to feel so pathetically upset as this was all his fault, his fault, his fault – but his heartbeat continued to race, and his head was so loud with pain, it consumed him. 

“Just fucking _awesome_ , Barnes.” Sam scoffed, though the words broke apart in his mouth, came undone the way their false love had, and now Sam sounded like Bucky, choked on the lump around his throat, cascading tears threatening to fall like shattering shards of broken glass. “You know what fucking sucks ass? Even despite the fact you never touch me, or your bullshit lies you like to tell to convince yourself, or how I’m just your rebound that you fantasise with to get over Steve – I still want you. I still fucking want you. How fucked-up is that?"

Bucky still wanted Steve, so it wasn’t as insane as it sounded. Or maybe it was, Bucky didn’t know. Maybe loving the things you couldn’t – the thing that didn’t love you back – was insane. He didn’t know the way it truly worked, other than the hurt of it all. Maybe that fact that love _hurt_ was the insanity, the fatal fault of it all, condemning them in their abandonment forever. 

Either way, it was, indeed, very fucked-up.

"I'm sorry, Sam,” Bucky gasped through lungs that never stilled since the atmosphere turned to ash, and the false parade of love died as everything else had.

"Yeah, me too." 

Sam left Bucky alone on the bed, aching to lose himself in the long-gone smell of five-cent coffee and the colour of charcoal on parchment. The art inside his head was ruined, ripped apart into seams of paper, while the monochrome shades bled down the canvas, a jarring contradiction to whatever it had been before – Bucky couldn’t remember what. 

He thinks that may have been a good thing, after all he needed to forget – forget the weight of Steve’s fingers within his own, the colour of his blood as it ran down his lip, the sound of his own name when Steve had said it on the bridge.

Though, in spite of it all, the gaping dagger wound inside his chest didn't seem to want to heal.

Bucky wasn't sure if he wanted it to.


End file.
